Unity Game Development Engine

Games are not yet a fully developed art form, and even still in what many believe to be its infancy, they require great time and detail to create what can only really be properly described as an experience. the creation of these experiences requires a lot of time and resources spent on building a system that can facilitate the desired effect, whether it be the realistic physics or beautiful, aesthetically pleasing worlds rendered by amazing graphics shaders, which accurately reflect light around carefully crafted worlds.

this is all of course, usually done separately from the creation of the game assets which essentially act as the real creative expression, and the real differentiating factor between each game. These assets usually take a relatively long time to develop. For this reason, its usually the case that studios and developers become frustrated having to spend a lot of resources creating a program which allows them to than in turn create a game using that program, this process is usually so costly that game development was consequentially not accessible to people on time or economic budgets, and usually not for people without a deep understanding of computer science or software engineering. That was of course until third party game engines came along and changed the world! Well, at least the world of game development.

A third party game engine is a program which sits on top of proprietary software for a platform, it allows the developers to take advantage of the capabilities of a particular platform but allow them to focus on their game and ignore the required systems like memory management, loading assets or taking inputs from the user.

One such a program is the now internationally recognized Unity Game Engine, which was initially released in 2005 as an option for OSX developers creating games for the Mac or Iphone to use c# instead of the objective-C required by apples X-Code IDE. Unity games have over the years become more and more prolific, now with over ‘5 billion games downloaded worldwide on over 2.4 billion unique devices, and over 21 supported platforms’(Technologies, 2016)[1], mainly, the major players in mobile such as the ‘IPhone, Android and Windows phone, the major gaming platforms such as PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo.’ (Technologies, 2016)[2]

So, Unity is undeniably popular, and I believe there are a at least four main factors which have encouraged its great success, likely the same factors which brought it to my personal attention and led me to believe that I too, a relatively uneducated person, with few skills, can in fact, design and develop games. Let’s look at these reasons -

One of these reasons and most likely the greatest single reason, is that Unity not only allows you to build your game to these platforms, its motto is “Build once, Deploy anywhere” (Technologies, 2016) [2] , which essentially means that as a game developer you can focus on building your game and not spend a lot of those resources on “boiler-plate code” which is basically code that has little or nothing to do with the program itself, but must be included as a means of communicating to a specific device, these bits of code are not usually changed between different projects but need to be included for the rest of the code to run as intended. Which means once the game logic is written, and the assets designed and integrated, the developers than spend time to individually add and remove the respective “boiler-plates” to have their game function on each respective device/hardware. Unity directly counters this with its ability to include the required “boiler-plates” by assessing the desired platform during build, greatly reducing the time it takes to release a game/ program on several platforms, allowing developers to tap into each market with the same amount of time it usually took to develop for only one.

Unity also gives its users several options of instructing the engine to create their game. Allowing developers to program in either c# or Unity Script(or Javascript for Unity) as its two main programming languages, and also includes its own simpler and not as popular form of communicating computer logic with its own programming language called Boo. Of these options c# is the most widely used and supported(aleksandr, Peterson, Paczkowski, Jones, & Chambers, 2016) [3]. More so than the ability to use several programming languages, is Unity’s game editor, which allows the user the luxury of a visible representation of their game, even without the need for code. The Unity editor comes equipped with several options that allow users to address issues in a visual and practical way while even allowing for objects to move in either a 2d or 3d space, using its internal Animation tools. These animation tools allow new users to see their project come to life with only a few mouse clicks and can allow designers or artists a chance to test their own work.

advanced users can even add to Unity by writing scripts to customize the editor and add extra functionality.
Another major attracting feature to Unity is the “Asset Store”. The Asset store allows users to advertise and sell their game assets to other developers, allowing one half of users an option to make money while in development or to develop for a completely new market, and allowing the other half of users an opportunity to purchase game assets they may have otherwise had to spend much more time and resources to complete. The asset store also provided many beginner developers an opportunity to include in their games, features they may have otherwise, with their current abilities, not been able to develop or include. Some developers have even considered focusing on developing extension tools available on the asset store as their main financial focus, earning ‘between $2,000 USD- $3,000 USD and even up to $10,000 USD a month!’ (Dobritskiy, n.d.) [4]

The last reason we are going into is an indirect but still very important factor in the attraction of users to the Unity platform. With its mounting popularity, ‘attracting over 47% of the game development industry and over 4.5 million registered developers’(Dobariya, n.d.) [5]. Unity has benefited greatly by focusing a portion of their resources to creating both programming and interface tutorials, and a community forum which acts as a medium for users to ask and answer game development related questions. These features have allowed unity to maximize on its more inexperienced users by allowing them an opportunity to find projects with similarity to their own and have game specific questions answered by experienced users. The forum also acts as an unofficial marketing platform for users publishing assets to the Asset store, and allows them a medium to communicate with users that may be having issues with their purchase.

And so, with all the difficulties involved in the development and delivery of a polished game, it becomes clear why most developers opt for taking advantage of anything that may increase their productivity. In this regard, I believe it is difficult to find any option that is better suited than the Unity engine, And what makes it even more appealing is the fact that you can start using it for free, even commercially, and are not required to pay until your earning above $100,000, of which even then, the payment is so small, at around $40 a month that it doesn’t compare to the cost of tools or facilitation of most other business endeavours.

As for me, Unity has become my favourite program, I find it difficult to have a conversation without mentioning game development, programming or the Unity engine. I am grateful to be entering the industry in this exciting time and believe I will likely be using Unity for the rest of my life.

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